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Excerpted Inspirations #240

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • 6 days ago
  • 0 min read
[Adam Eddington and Vicky Austin are sitting on the beach one evening, trying to come to terms with the death of a newborn dolphin and the recent and imminent death of loved ones. Mr. Rochester is the Austins’ Great Dane. Basil is a wild dolphin befriended by Adam and Vicky.] “Are you afraid?” he asked softly. Yes. I didn’t say it aloud. I didn’t need to. “Of what, Vicky?” He picked up another handful of sand, and started trickling it through his fingers. “Dying?” His voice wasn’t loud, but it seemed to explode into the night. Mr. Rochester shifted position and I continued absentmindedly to scratch behind his ears, his short fur rough under my fingers. “Not so much of dying, if – I’m afraid of annihilation. Of not being.” Adam let all the sand fall. “I guess we all are, if it comes to that.” “Is that what you think it comes to? That Commander Rodney was just snuffed out? And Ynid’s baby? And that Grandfather will be? And all of us?” There was a long silence against which the waves moving into the shore and the light wind in the grasses and the and Rochester’s breathing sounded in counterpoint. At last Adam spoke. “I’m not a churchgoer, Vicky. I hadn’t darkened the doors of a church since I sang in choir at school till – till Commander Rodney’s funeral. So maybe what I think is kind of heretical.” “What do you think?” I desperately wanted to know. Maybe because of Basil, I trusted Adam. The breeze lifted and blew across us, pushing my hair back from my forehead. I must have shivered, because Adam put one arm lightly across my shoulders. “When are you most completely you, Vicky?” It wasn’t at all what I expected him to say. I was looking for answers, not more questions. “When?” he repeated. Maybe because I was feeling extraordinarily tired I was thinking in scenes, rather than logical sequences, and across my mind’s eye flashed a picture of the loft, with the old camp cots, and the windows overlooking the ocean, and the lighthouse with its friendly beam, and on the far wall the lines of the poem Grandfather had painted there. If thou couldst empty all thyself of self … I was not really myself when I was all replete with very me. So when was I? “When you first brought me to meet Basil,” I said slowly, “and when I was petting him and scratching his chest …” “Who were you thinking about?” “Basil.” “Were you thinking about you?” “No.” “But you were really being you?” “Yes.” “So that’s a contradiction, isn’t it? You weren’t thinking about yourself at all. You were completely thrown out of yourself in concentration on Basil. And yet you were really being you.” I leaned my head against Adam’s shoulder. “Much more than when I’m all replete with very me.” His right hand drew my head more comfortably against his shoulder. “So, when we’re thinking consciously about ourselves, we’re less ourselves than when we’re not being self-centered.” “I suppose …” -Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light (1980), pp. 160-162)

 
 
 
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